Who me?
If you follow coding culture at all, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Imposter Syndrome. In the event that you’re not, I won’t be as cruel as to link you via LMGTFY. Impostor Syndrome is
…a feeling of “phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement.” While these people “are highly motivated to achieve,” > they also “live in fear of being ‘found out’ or exposed as frauds.” source
This is usually the part where the article you’re reading will ask, “Sound familiar?” But not me. It didn’t sound familiar to me at all when I first learned about it. I didn’t identify with it until I was in the throes of it myself.
During my first week at The Iron Yard, all cohorts gathered together and we had a discussion about this as a community. But I couldn’t identify with the common definition. I told myself that I couldn’t suffer from impostor syndrome because:
How can I feel like a fake if I acknowledge that I’m a n00b? I can’t be found out if I am under no pretenses that I know much. Impostor Syndrome definitions often mention “success.” I wouldn’t put what I was doing anywhere near the category of “success.”
Of course I don’t belong - I’m a female POC trying to break through in a predominantly white, male field.
I’m not alone. I’m sitting in a room full of other people trying to learn how to code and are hoping they’ll get a job after 12 weeks. I had read questions (and the sometimes unnecessarily mean answers) on StackOverflow and Reddit before. I’d been persuaded to join the CodeNewbies Slack team. If there’s a thriving community of other n00bs, then it’s a simple fact that I am not alone.
I carried these explanations with me all throughout my TIY experience. But then I got a new job that required me to use my programming knowledge. This also happened to be the convenient time when I forgot all about Impostor Syndrome, because I felt that I had more important things to worry about, such as figuring out this bug.
Then one day I posted the “I have no idea” meme on Facebook. And a few of my former web dev colleagues responded along the lines of, “and you still won’t 10 years later” or “welcome to the club!” OK, cool. Good to know.
A few months later, I was asked to fix something written by a colleague who suddenly went on leave. The non-tech people on the team were panicking and it spread to me. Mid freaking out, I shot a blubbering text to a dev friend of mine. Here’s what I wrote:
Sometimes I wonder: why did I do this? I have no idea what they’re [non-tech team members panicking] talking about. I have no idea why my colleague wrote what he wrote. What am I going to do? Will it matter if it takes me all day to Google and string together the script this guy wrote? Will everyone be upset?
Like a true friend, he said some calming words and gave encouraging tips, but all of this was preceded by one sentence.
This sounds like imposter syndrome.
Wow, OK.I just thought it was my anxiety that made me react like this. But I guess he’s right. Huh. Yeah, I guess me panicking about not being able to solve a problem fast enough is really another interpretation of being exposed as a fraud. I truly believed that people think I know more than I really do.
But on the whole, I still didn’t believe I was suffering from full-blown Impostor Syndrome. I still wouldn’t call myself successful. And besides, it really was just luck that I ended up tracing down that root cause. And my job now? That was pure luck and timing that I even got an offer. It’s equally probable that I would still be stuck at my old job. Boy, I was ignorant of my own situation.
It took a 5 minute podcast segment before the light bulb went off. It’s an unlikely podcast for me to relate to. It’s hosted by three white males with many years of experience with .NET development. They don’t only discuss coding culture, so I actually learn something each time I listen. I find their discussions are relevant to a lot of OOP as well as my day-to-day job duties, and they’re technical, but not dry.
They hit on Impostor Syndrome in Episode 43 - Nulls, Procs and Impostor Syndrome. You can fast forward to 1:11:00 for the discussion on Impostor Syndrome. The moment when I went ding! was when one of them (sorry, CB hosts, I can tell your voices apart but still have no clue which one of you is doing the talking) said that he does concede that part of his achievements, however big or small, is due to luck and timing. Ultimately, it’s him that places himself in the situation that makes the luck and timing fortuitous. And it’s easy to get a task that makes you feel stupid, simply because you should know. But in web development, there’s so much to learn that it can become crippling when you think about how much more there is to learn and how you may be behind the curve because you don’t know it all yet and, goodness gracious, that small bit of knowledge about xyz framework could be the answer to the task that you can’t quite figure out.
DING, DING, DING! Yo, I totally have Impostor’s Syndrome because I feel like this on the reg.
I feel like this every time I do anything dev related (which is often). It may not feel like “I’m going to found out and lose my job” every single time, but it’s enough doubt to make me worry that I’ll look like a fool the moment my work gets reviewed. And it took micro-examples for me to finally relate and admit to myself that I suffer from Impostor Syndrome. The good news? Admitting I had a problem abated the problem at the same time. It’s a reminder that the feeling of insecurity dissipates when you call it out because it feeds upon itself.
So where does this leave me? Do I still freak out a little every time I submit something? Yes, but. But what? But I’ve been motivated to spend a few more minutes every day learning some new part of my craft. But now I’ve taken on meditation to help me feel more grounded and myself so that I’m more aware of the anxiety I feel when I submit that thing. But now I have an audio byte that I replay when I need to relate to someone else. But now I feel less ashamed when I express these feelings of inadequacy to someone else. I have Impostor Syndrome, but that’s OK.
